No Place Like Home

“There’s no place like home,” Dorothy says at the end of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ when she returns to Kansas. I still find watching this scene, cheesy as it is, brings tears to my ears, because I know where she’s coming from.

No matter where we go in the world, no matter how many fabulous places we visit, it’s always a great joy to arrive home again. And ‘home’ has many forms. Home is England – after foreign travel, we get back to the rain; green hills; signs in English, spelled the proper (read: non-American) way; everyone driving on the left; roads clogged with traffic; gridlock on the M25: it’s all good, because it means we’re home.

Home is London, with its overcrowded streets; delays on the underground; the ridiculous bendy buses that have replaced the old routemasters; people trying to accost you with free newspapers; Trafalgar Square; tourists hanging around Buckingham Palace with their cameras, hoping for a glimpse of the Queen.

And more literally, home is my house; my abode; my place of dwelling; my sanctuary. A place more than bricks and mortar. Walking through the front door after a trip is always wonderful, and the longer we’ve been away the more wonderful it is. We dump the suitcases in the hallway, we take off our shoes, we have a cup of tea (and call me prejudiced but I am convinced tea everywhere else in the world is just not as good as the stuff you can buy in Britain) and we collapse on the sofa. And we switch on the BBC news channel, because even if we’ve been somewhere where there’s an international news channel on the TV in the hotel room, it’s likely to have been an American one like CNN, and listening to the news is not quite the same when it’s not read out in a cultured BBC accent.

I don’t even have to go very far to gain an appreciation for home. Every day when I arrive home from work, I get that lovely feeling when I walk through the front door. “Here I am. Home.”

No matter where I go in life, or what is in store for me in the future, I know I’ll always look forward to coming home.

Unless they are in Cornish or Welsh. I don’t know about the Queen’s English, to many extra letters for my taste. The fact is that the difference between North American spelling and the Queen’s English are deliberate. Americans thought that they were to many letters and silent sounds carried over from Celtic, French and Germanic sources to be useful in the new world. So they cut many of them out. Not all of them, but many.

Mind you, if I ever do fulfill my dream of living in England I’ll have to get used to it. I mean, when in Rome, right?